That's just a straw man. If you're healthy and don't need a lot of doctor visits and prescription medication, you get a plan that covers trauma, major medical (for serious illness and disease). There are lots of ways to have health coverage without allowing every pharmaceutical company and hospital consortium putting in coverage for all their little pet treatments. And then you've got a nice risk pool, not a corporate welfare program.

That's the problem with requiring all these "government approved" mandates that most people don't need - insurance coverage has gone from barely-affordable to even less affordable. Expand Medicare / Medicaid and be done with it. Implementing a welfare tax using insurance companies as revenue collectors is a failure.

You asked the question and answered it yourself. How to "compete" with the Chiners is about manufacturing, not necessarily labor. Automation improves productivity, efficiency, cost, AND reduces pollution. Yet we just gave China a pass to continue increasing pollution for the long term, while requiring even stricter regulations on our own businesses. Why? Do we hate the Chinese and want to kill them? Or do we hate US businesses and want to kill THEM? What I would "prefer" is some movement toward equitable pollution controls on manufacturers, not assigning China all the manufacturing, and assigning the US all the debt required to keep the unemployed from complete homelessness and starvation.

And where does all the extra money come from? The government does not have some magic wand that can create increased wages. All it can do is inflate the currency, which does not benefit the working class because they are always at the bottom of the rung of the extra cash, so by the time they get it inflation has already taken its toll. Your idea that you can mandate a better economy has been proven to be a fantasy.

Maybe, but as you say, it's unlikely to happen. A better strategy (and one also politically unlikely, but not as unlikely as the "guaranteed income" plan) is to implement a wealth tax. Don't bother with your bitter arguments about the problems with a wealth tax - I heard it all before, and it is feasible and has a proven history.

I see you've had a taste of the kool-aid, and it's got you see hallucinations. In this case, you think that the labor pool in the US is operating in a free market. It's not. And that is the problem - not that free markets have failed, but that there is not free market for labor due to excessive central planning and interventions.

China's labor market (for its industry, anyway), operates much more like a free market than the one in the US. And it's starting to raise wages (slowly, painfully). Unfortunately, we've just given them a free pass to NOT pay for ANY of the externalalities associated with polluting the environment. You seem to think that's okay. So I assume that's only because you like getting lots of cheap crap from Chinese factories, and would rather see lots of other people suffer to keep the gravy train flowing. I see this as nothing but a "I've got mine - screw you" mentality.

This. Because your post is reasonable and informative, it will be seen by the hive-mind as corporate shilling bullshit and down-modded into oblivion. That's a shame. I'm no fan of Comcast - they could have just let Netflix install caching servers in their data centers like Netflix has done at other ISPs, but you've pointed out one of the issues with the push for government-regulated "network neutrality", and that there are issues that the end-point consumers just don't understand and won't even listen to.

There are a LOT more issues at stake, here, and we should not let the debate be controlled by a bunch of Internet users that are angry because they're Netflix is buffering during their Califonication-watching marathon.

What fucked up that approach was qualifying it with "government approved", and then adding every kind of coverage plus the kitchen sink into the requirements. Remember "catastrophic coverage" plans? Yea, that's all that most young healthy people need, but they are illegal now. Because old, fat, and self-destructive people need more coverage than that, so healthy, young, and hard-working people need to pay for that too. Because we can't going around asking people to be taking some responsibility for their own health, now can we?

Nope, he passed the plan as designed, and it worked because the AMERICAN VOTERS ARE STUPID, and they'll ask for this piece of shit because they'll believe whatever lie the "most transparent administration" tells them.

For nearly all market for gasoline, the demand IS inelastic. Truckers need to ship goods, people need to go to work. Gas prices get high enough, some people might look closer and a more fuel-efficient car if they are in the market for one, or some people might not take a vacation or stay closer to home, but that is such a small portion of the market as to look mostly like noise. If the cost of beef goes up enough, lots of people will be eating more chicken, but there are no substitutes for getting food to the grocery stores, or keeping gas in the car you can afford so you can keep getting to work. Moronic anecdotes about a minor uptick in sales of Hummers, or other less fuel efficient personal vehicles, is just noise, and these decisions will have no discernible affect on the price of gas, or pollution, for that matter.

Don't worry - we'll be increasing energy prices and exporting our pollution to China, now that Obama has a new agreement to do just that. So we'll get even more unemployed to buy even more cheap crap from Walmart, and they can hire even more 29-hour-per-week part-timers that will live on food stamps and heavy subsidies from Obamacare.

Well now that Obama has made a climate change agreement with China that will accelerate US exports of pollution to China for at least the next 20 years, you can look forward to buying even more stuff from China.

The problem with these proposals is that the "indexed to inflation" idea doesn't actually use inflation to adjust gas prices. It uses an artificial (and experimental) index called the "Producer Price Index” (PPI). Specifically the category that is supposed to track prices for “Other nonresidential construction”. What this means is that taxes for consumers change based on what contractors charge governments for road construction.

The problem with tying tax increases to this type of "inflation" measure is the market itself they are measuring. In basic economics we assume that prices rise and fall based on supply and demand. But the “market” measured in this index is vanishingly small. 13 states currently use the index to adjust their fuel taxes. The “consumers” in the market are exclusively governments, and the producers are exclusively government contractors, often organized using industry groups like the VTCA. So now we have a feedback loop that starts to eliminate downward pressure on prices. And in a closed market such as this, when consumers are provided exactly the amount of funding required for their purchases, we get an ever-spiraling increase in costs, all borne by taxpayers with no recourse except pressuring legislators to take action in repealing a tax. And with powerful lobby groups like the VTCA and the many planning commissions that represent construction contractors, opposing such a reversal it is unlikely to happen. So we end up with a tax that increases perpetually even as relative wage income declines.

So we just phase-in the tax slowly, because AMERICANS ARE STUPID and they will never notice.

It can be frustrating. While at the "Lockn Festival" in Virginia, my phone kept thinking it was in Scottsdale, Arizona. The weather reports were bad enough, but the worst part was the time on my phone kept coming up in Mountain time, so I was always 2 hours behind. I think that issue was because they brought in mobile towers, since that rural part of Virginia doesn't normally have any mobile coverage, and I guess someone forgot to set the location on the towers.

You mean like the crime of "driving while black"?

Since I've already quoted Spooner, I might as well go ahead and pull out a choice quote from Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" as a response to this inane comment:

"SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. ... Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer."

That's true. But not the GP called it "crime", as in, they are put away for non-crimes (i.e., they were incarcerated despite the lack of an identifiable victim.

No. The "state" cannot be a victim, it owns a monopoly on "legal" violence, and exists only to protect the rights of its citizens. If the State can claim to be a victim and kill and incarcerate citizens because to protect itself from its people, then it has become a tyranny and should be dismantled. The state should rightly fear its people, not the other way around.

And since you seem to be implying that possession and/or distribution of some state-declared contraband (an act the state punishes blacks for very disproportionally than whites), I'll leave this quote from Lysander Spooner right here for you to ponder:

Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property. Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another. Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property. In vices, the very essence of crime - that is, the design to injure the person or property of another - is wanting. It is a maxim of the law that there can be no crime without criminal intent; that is, without the intent to invade the person or property of another. But no one ever practices a vice with any such criminal intent. He practices his vice for his own happiness solely, and not from any malice toward others. Unless this clear distinction between vices and crimes be made and recognized by the laws, there can be on earth no such thing as individual right, liberty, or property, and the corresponding coequal rights of another man to the control of his own person and property.

For a government to declare a vice to be a crime, and to punish it as such, is an attempt to falsify the very nature of things. It is as absurd as it would be to declare truth to be a falsehood, or falsehood a truth.

"Real", yes, absolutely. Pervasive in hiring decisions for tech workers? I don't think so. It really does not make any sense. It is certainly something that I have seen zero evidence of from many years in the tech world - just the opposite, in fact. You could say it's pervasive in traffic stops (and that is something that we should try to fix), but uniformed cops don't hire programmers.